i am seriously smitten with this leigh bardugo, and as soon as my reading time becomes my own again, i am ON her series like crazy. Okay, tor shorts, i officially love you again. “… come help me stir the pot.”Available free online at. Those who like dark fairy tales will enjoy this twisty tale. (Although I liked the series, I think this story is even better.) This folk tale, with elements of both fantasy and horror, might be told on a dark night by a villager living in Ravka, the setting of THE GRISHA series. This short story is related to THE GRISHA young adult fantasy series, but is a stand-alone story unrelated to the characters and events in that series. When Nadya gets lost in the forest, she comes across a strange hut in the woods where an old woman cooks over a vast black cookstove, with bubbling pots and an oven large enough for a child to get inside… I might be forgiven for thinking that I knew where the story was heading at this point, but I was completely wrong.

She sends Nadya out to check their traps for rabbits in the dark. Now, as the famine deepened and the people of Duva went without, it was as if whatever waited in the woods had grown greedier and more desperate, too.Nadya’s father marries a neighboring widow, who makes it clear that Nadya isn’t welcome in her house. True, there were rumors of girls being taken from other villages from time to time, but those children hardly seemed real. In the past, girls had vanished every few years. The children’s mother fades away and dies, the famine deepens, and ― worst of all ― girls begin disappearing from the village. When a famine hits, Maxim no longer gets enough work from the other impoverished villagers. They live in a village on the edge of a deep, dark forest. Review first posted at There was a time when the woods near Duva ate girls.“The Witch of Duva” is a dark Russian-flavored fairy tale with echoes of Hansel and Gretel and a serial killer twist… or is it wolves? Nadya and her brother Havel are the children of Maxim Grushov, a carpenter and woodcutter.

“The Witch of Duva” is one of my all-time favorite creepy stories, a short story by Leigh Bardugo that's an online freebie as well.

The witch of duva leigh bardugo